5 FOREST FROGS

CHAPTER 5 FOREST FROGS "OK, you can come over now, Zoey and Sassafras!" Pip hollered from a few feet away. "Ready?" I whispered to Sassafras. "Meow," he whispered back. We crept slowly over to where Pip was standing with a group of five little forest frogs of various bright colors. I squatted down so I wouldn't look super tall to them and gave a slow wave. Two of them waved back, but the other three looked down at their feet. So shy!

Pip cleared his throat. "So, the news isn't great. My friends followed the mess the hophops left, and most of the forest roses had all of their bips eaten." Pip pointed over to his right, and I turned to look. "WHOOOOOAAAA!" I shouted. "Eeeep!" squealed the tiniest frog, and he hopped behind a rock and hid.

"Oh gosh, sorry!" I whispered. "I didn't mean to shout. I just hadn't seen the damage from the hophops yet. Pip, you weren't kidding when you said they ate just about everything in their path!" Over where Pip had pointed was a path several feet wide that stretched way back into the forest. In the path were a few nubs of grasses and some wilty, pale forest roses… and dirt. Just about everything else had been eaten up. I stood on my tippy-toes and tried to follow the path through the forest. "Ohhhhh," I said under my breath. The path twisted around over

to where Sassafras and I had been building Bug Houses yesterday. "Hey, Pip? Do the hophops look like a gray cloud?" "Only sometimes. Usually just a few here or there are nibbling on plants. Not enough to be more than a bother. But every few years we get too many hatching all at once. And this happens." He poked at the dirt left behind and sighed, and then he hopped over to a wiltylooking forest rose. "Bring your Looky Thingy and look here." I peered through the magnifying glass at the leaf Pip pointed to. "It looks neat up close like this," I said as I tilted the magnifying glass and leaf for Sassafras to take a peek.

Pip sighed. "Right, but it also has no bips. That's not good." "Uhh, what do bips look like exactly? Are they usually on the leaves?" I asked. "Over here!" squeaked a faraway frog voice. Sass and I followed Pip over to his friend who was standing by a single, healthy forest rose bush. "I finally found one!" She pointed at the bright rose bush. "This is what it's supposed to look like when you look through your Looky Thingy."

"Oh my goodness!" I whispered. "Sassafras! Look!" I tilted the leaf and magnifying glass down for Sass, and he touched his nose to it. "Oh gosh, bips are really, really cute." I bent down by Sassafras and watched them all. Instead of seeing the leaf surface with all of its veins, this rose leaf looked like a sea of miniature green creatures. They wiggled this way and that as they looked up at us with their eyes. I noticed that one bip in particular was moving a lot, and then there seemed to be a spark of light. "Did you see that?" I rubbed my eyes before looking back through my magnifying glass. "Oh, wow. I was sure that was just one bip a second ago, but now there are two!" Pip leaned over to look. "Hm, I just see a lot of bips!" "Oh! What if we took some of these bips and put them on the other roses? Do you think that could fix them?" "That wouldn't work," Pip replied. "Do you see how many there are? The forest roses need strong magic to help the baby hippogriff wings work. We'd need hundreds… no, thousands… no, bazillions of bips to make the magic that